Customer integration is the component of customer relationship management, which puts technology in place that allows customers to process their own transactions and to have direct contact with the organization. This means that the need for intermediaries is reduced. This requires a good B2B integration platform, and monitoring of the processes involving customers, such as order fulfillment, delivery, order-to-cash etc.
You ought to consider seriously re-assessing your B2B infrastructure if you identify with any of the following:
|
You are |
Encountering one of the following pains |
| VP Supply Chain | • Meeting customer’s SLA requirements/ Customer commitments : Challenge in goods delivery time and accuracy
• In Make to Stock situation, preventing out of stock • In Make to Order situation, order lead time and accuracy |
| VP B2B Operations | • Meeting customer’s SLA requirements : Uptime, process/response time
• Lack of pro-activeness on operational issues • Visibility on orders stuck in process |
| VP Outbound Logistics | • Inability to track the full order-to-cash process
• Providing order status to the customer in real time • Lack of pro-activeness on operational issues • Visibility on orders stuck in process |
| EDI or IT Director/Manager | • Not meeting business requirements due to outdated EDI platform feature and functionality
• Lack of visibility into business process breakdowns • High resource cost due to cumbersome methods for remediating transaction issues • Ensuring compliance with internal security policy |
Not meeting customer’s SLA requirements is probably one of the major drivers for reconsidering the B2B infrastructure. The reasons for this can be:
- Lack of visibility on delivery time and accuracy. Too many unexpected order-to-delivery delays, due to the lack of appropriate analytics tools that highlight where orders are blocked and alert on potential delay situation.
- Low uptime and pro-activeness on operational issues. Too much unavailability of the B2B platform due to downtime. Customers sending orders via B2B platforms expect very high uptime of the platform, and pro-activeness in case operational issues arise, such as loss of orders and Advanced Shipment Notices.
If these issues are not remedied, the impact on your organization can be considerable:
- In Make to Stock, not having the appropriate visibility on the supply process might cause an out of stock situation preventing from meeting customers’ demands
- In Make to Order, Not being able to monitor order life cycle might generate lead-time deviations as well as inaccuracy in delivery.
- Not being able to provide order status to the customer in real time, impacting sales and customer services organizations.
- In some case this might create problems in compliance with internal security policy
- Brand image damage
- Loss of revenue
- Customer churn
Supply Chain Visibility is increasingly top of mind of all players in the supply chain. Digital economy is putting high-pressure on supply chains in order to fulfill the customer expectations: predictable and short delivery times, product immediate availability, customizable and competitively priced products.
You should consider the following capabilities when looking for a solution:
- Via dashboards and alerts, the solution permanently monitors if the supply chain is following the plan
- Anticipates risks of not meeting commitments, and not simply detects them afterwards
- Detects very early on any lost, rejected or blocked transactions
- Reduces the costs of problem investigation and resolution
- Allows integration and easy on-boarding of customers
- High-availability
- Full visibility on data transactions
Integration and Analytics in Supply Chain 